Weapon mounted accessories often incorporate shock attenuation mechanisms to protect the accessories from the shock resulting from discharge of the weapon. Shock attenuation has been achieved to varying degrees of success using one or more of damping/soft materials such as rubber, flexures, springs, preloading techniques, pneumatics/hydraulics, inertia, geometrical stiffness, material selection, torsion bars, and McPherson struts (and other vehicle suspension solutions), among others.
Weapon mountable accessories are often attached to a weapon by a rail system. While the rail systems are convenient, they may transmit recoil shock from the discharged projectile to the accessory, which may damage the accessory, for example, delicate optics, such as a weapon image intensification (II) tube. Flexures have been implemented in such mounting systems such that the flexures absorb and/or dissipate shock energy rather than transmitting the shock energy to the accessory, as shown in FIG. 1A. A weapon mounted accessory 110, a sight in this instance, is mounted via flexures 150 attached by connectors 160 to a weapon mounted rail. The flexures 150 provide a pure translational movement oriented along the rail 190, as indicated by the arrows. However, orientating flexures 150 in this manner may require a space envelope, of the order of several millimetres for example, which may not be available in some applications. Such translational flexures 150 may also introduce undesirable secondary modes, as shown in FIG. 1B, which may degrade performance. Also, translational flexures 150 may suffer from high stresses under extreme shocks, and may thus be susceptible to failure and/or permanent distortion. Finally, translational flexures are often not adequate to provide sufficient attenuation. Therefore, there is a need in the industry to address one or more of the abovementioned shortcomings.